In his History of the Illustrated Book (1981), John Harthan remarks on the relative rarity of illustrated books in the Jewish tradition. He links this to the prohibition of graven images in Exodus 20:4:
The prohibition of any ‘graven image’ in the Second Commandment (Exodus 20:4) was to prevent idolatry (‘thou shalt not bow down to them nor serve them,’ v. 5); it largely but by no means completely eliminated figurative representation in Jewish art. The earliest known Hebrew illuminated manuscript dates from the ninth century and in Egyptian in origin. By the fourteenth century a tradition of illumination had become well established in northern Spain and southern France (the Sephardic complex), in north-west Germany (the Ashkenazi complex) and in Italy.
Harthan 49
Unfortunately, Harthan does not provide any examples of texts in which authors explicitly argue against the use of illustration by referencing Exodus 20:4.
Works Cited
Harthan, John. The History of the Illustrated Book: The Western Tradition. Thames and Hudson, 1981.
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